Is ‘Singapore math’ a better way to teach the subject?

Imagine you’re a character in a math problem. You have three platters, but two cakes. All three platters need to have the same amount of cake. How would you split it? Without even saying the word “divide,” a group of about 20 teachers from private schools spanning Pennsylvania, Maryland and Virginia, stacked cubes and folded notecards to find solutions. The answer? Two-thirds of cake per platter. But the problem doesn’t end there.

During this training in “Singapore math” — teaching methods and curricula developed in Singapore, which has consistently led the world in student math performance — Math Champions founder Cassy Turner then asked the teachers explain why they did what they did, before moving on to the next question. Owings Mills K-12 girls’ school, Garrison Forest School, hosted the two-day public workshop recently on this style of teaching math. After seeing success adopting Singapore math for its lower school over the past two years, Garrison is expanding the curriculum through eighth grade this year.

Other Maryland schools — private, charter and public — have also incorporated the teaching style into their curricula in the hopes of emulating Singapore’s three decades of success. Singapore math was developed by that Southeast Asian country’s Ministry of Education decades ago. It is a teaching style that avoids rote memorization and focuses on a slower learning approach to teach mathematical concepts, allowing students to understand them in greater detail. At the kindergarten level, that means not introducing the plus or minus symbols until the end of the year, US Singapore math textbook consultant Susan Resnick said. Instead, students can spend their time telling stories with numbers to decode the relationship between them. For example, after looking at a picture, a student might say, “There are four boys in the picture and one girl. Four and one make five.” Research has found that students learn math best when mixing in physical objects like counting chips and blocks with drawings and in-depth discussion, said Pat Campbell, retired professor emerita at the University of Maryland’s Center for Mathematics Education. Singapore math teaches concepts beginning with concrete materials, then progresses to pictures and then brings students to abstract symbols like the plus or minus sign.

Older children’s class discussions go over three or four different methods the students used to solve a problem, always ending on the one closest to the day’s goal, Turner said.

Singapore math’s portrayal of numerical relationships is particularly “clever,” especially in how it uses drawn bars to help students visualise relationships, Campbell said. Memorisation doesn’t work well On international measures of math performance, Singapore has consistently been a top scorer since the mid-1990s. Seeing those high scores spurred American textbook publishers to localise Singaporean math materials for US classrooms, according to Campbell. But at the core of Singapore math is problem-solving, Resnick said.

“Where we grew up, maybe thinking that calculation was the goal of mathematics ... they teach calculation as a support to get to problem-solving,” she said. Singapore teaches students starting with attitudes and thought processes, Resnick explained to the teachers, whereas American math education usually gets bogged down in the skills and concepts. Developing a conceptual understanding of math from the ground up isn’t unique to Singapore math — it’s “something that people in math education have been espousing for many years, but it requires professional development on the part of teachers,” Campbell said.

Contrast Singapore math with what Campbell called “a show-and-tell model” of math instruction “where somebody shows you how to solve a problem and you practice doing it over and over and over again, with a reliance on memory.”

“We actually know that doesn’t work very well if you look at the product of kids’ achievement,” she said.

By fourth grade, Turner said, kids know if they like math or not. They’re more aware of their peers and can get embarrassed by their answers. “They won’t ask questions, they won’t raise their hand, and so they fall further and further behind,” she said. But Singapore math can make the subject students’ third favorite behind P.E. and lunch, Turner said.

At Garrison, all three divisions previously used a different textbook program. Extending Singapore math through middle school means students only have to transition to upper school math, said Sydney Carter, the middle school’s dean and a sixth-grade math teacher. Strategies, like drawing bar models that students learn early on, can be used to scaffold on more advanced concepts like ratios, Carter said. “That helps them feel like, ‘Oh, I can access this sort of.’”

That confidence is translating to results for Garrison’s students. The majority of K-5 students showed more than a year’s worth of growth in math on Measures of Academic Progress assessments taken last school year, according to Shannon Schmidt, director of Garrison’s Boyce Center for Learning and Thriving.